Retail and Urgent Care Articles

In patients given a new opiate prescription in the ED, 13.7% had persistent or high risk use over the next year. Higher doses led to greater risk, but even appropriate lower doses were associated with up to a 10% risk.

Physicians who wrote for the most antibiotics were also the ones who diagnosed sinusitis most often. To justify writing for an antibiotic, there was a coding bias to call it “sinusitis” when in fact, it probably was just a cold.

Removal of the ARISTOTLE study (known to contain falsified data) from 22 subsequent meta-analyses led to a change in the conclusion of these meta-analyses nearly half the time. Research misconduct hurts people.

The Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS)/Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) formula to define hypotension in children (i.e. 5th percentile SBP) seems to be a good compromise between German and U.S. population norms for children. The formula is: Low SBP = <70 + 2(age in years).

In this large cohort study of over 1.8 million pregnancies, first trimester ondansetron use was not associated with cardiac malformations or total congenital malformations. However, there was a small increased risk of oral clefts (3 additional cases per 10,000 women treated).

”Tachypnea at triage, chronic ulcers, history of MRSA colonization or infection, and cellulitis within the past year,” were the risk factors associated with failure of oral antibiotic therapy for non-purulent cellulitis.

Topical antibiotic use for bacterial conjunctivitis was associated with improved rate of clinical cure compared to placebo. For early and late clinical cure with topical antibiotics, the NNT was 9 and 11, respectively.

Adults with cough <3weeks or 3-8 weeks with post-tussive vomiting or whooping should be treated for pertussis; those with fever or without paroxysmal cough should be considered to have an alternate diagnosis. Children with <4 weeks of cough and post-tussive vomiting may have pertussis, but it was much less clear than in adults.